There’s not much those of us who loiter around the hotel sector can teach wider hospitality. Our guests are mostly unconscious. They can be demanding around breakfast time, but then, who isn’t?

 

But every now and then, something hotels do breaks through into the greater world and is – or isn’t – favourably welcomed. The taste for asking people for their credit cards the minute they walk into a venue, in case they walk out with the fixtures and fittings, hasn’t really caught on. 

 

But something that is creeping in is the black art of revenue management. We first saw this make its presence felt last year at O’Neill's in Wardour Street, in Soho, where the site used one of the tools of revenue management, dynamic pricing, to add £2 on the price of a pint after 10pm – to reflect, it said, the additional cost of the security required after 10pm. When we all turn into werewolves? It wasn’t clear. File it under “the further adventures of Westminster City Council”.

 

This move wasn’t universally applauded. The Independent ran a column headlined “Uber-style price gouging will ensure this beloved institution’s extinction”. This doesn’t speak to support for a sector at a time when costs are spiking up all over the place, like so many punk revivals. The comparison with Uber is also somewhat disingenuous; the ride share service has created an effective monopoly in many locations that allows it to charge higher rates when demand is high. Other pubs are available, even after 10pm.

 

So dynamic pricing has not made a wholesale move over from the hotel sector, but other aspects of revenue management have. At a recent Propel event, panellists from a selection of restaurant groups were asked what they were planning to do about the increases in costs, and many were confident they could pass them on to the consumer. One individual had a more nuanced approach: they would pass the costs on to the consumer but at differing levels, depending on the postcode. 

 

This sparked outrage on the part of this hack, and not just because of their fancy postcode (in large part because of their fancy postcode). Outrage was quickly followed by some quick calculations based on transport costs versus convenience versus potential uplift in cost per steak before outrage crept back in again. Why the assumption that a fancy postcode means someone can also tolerate a more expensive meal?

 

Once the outrage had subsided, or been usurped by something Trump had done, something more along the lines of clear thinking crept in. Here in hotel land, if you are on top of your revenue management – and many aren’t – you will be well versed in the art of varying your rates according to location, time, day of the week or cycle of the moon. It goes on. 

 

And for the larger hotel companies, location-based pricing is a long-established strategy. And one that the guest is very much used to. Do you expect your Holiday Inn in Central London to be the same rate as your Holiday Inn in Liverpool? You do not, as the many hotels that pop up next to motorway junctions attest.

 

Part of the reason you’re paying less to stay at a motorway junction but more to stay next to the airport terminal is the cost of the location, something that will be as important a part of the development cost of the site as wondering how close the nearest strawberry farm is. Shouldn’t the price of the product reflect that cost? If your restaurant is in the middle of Mayfair, it’s going to cost more in rent and more in team costs.

 

If the guest has been watching enough of those property programmes – and the data suggests that they have – they can comprehend the idea that restaurants in a more upscale location are going to be pricier than restaurants next to the hotel on the motorway junction. Even if it’s the same brand.

 

And it’s this last area where the transition from the established world of hotel revenue management has issues making its way into pubs and restaurants. The brand promise. In hotel land, the brand promise is, well, there’s a whole industry trying to decipher what a hotel brand promise is. In hotels, the brand is something used predominantly to attract investors, with the promise that the hotel company in charge can deliver heads in beds using their magnificent distribution systems, fuelled by their millions-strong loyalty programme.

 

In pubs and restaurants, brands are much closer to being consumer brands. They have a clear message to sell. The customer might not understand what a Holiday Inn offers – it’s probably cheaper than the Four Seasons – but you know what Wagamama does and what it stands for. 

 

Bearing in mind the bigger they are, the harder they fall, messing with the strength of your brand is not advisable. While we may be able to understand that an independent restaurant will cost more in an area where the rents and team costs are high, as yet, we won’t tolerate it from a brand. But, as costs continue to rise, this is one lever it grows increasingly tempting to pull. 

 

While enjoying a beer in the Horse & Groom in Belgravia, another male customer walked in and ordered a bottle of 4.5% lager while his female partner went for a 250ml glass of wine. The exercise was repeated for the next round, with the result that he had consumed a modest three units of alcohol while she had downed a hefty 6.5 units. I’ve seen a similar occurrence occur on other occasions.   

 

The upshot is that she has consumed almost half the weekly recommended consumption of alcohol for women. Although I believe these maximum unit allowances are a blunt instrument and largely meaningless because there are so many other mitigating factors at play when drinking alcohol, I’ve long since thought the 250ml pour is an obscene amount.

 

I’m therefore hoping we will see something of a move away from these monster pours towards smaller measures. This would take us back to historical norms, when glasses were significantly smaller and so the measures poured into them were reduced accordingly. The beer glasses my grandmother would bring out for family gatherings now look incredibly tiny. We occasionally bring them out, but they are almost comically small for drinking beer – for anything other than high strength brews.

 

Third-of-a-pints are now my go-to measure for stronger beers at my local, the Great Northern Railway Tavern. Once a beer is in the 8% territory, then I tend to drink them as a third-pint chaser alongside a two-thirds pour of a session strength beer around 4%.

 

A burgeoning trend for focusing more on smaller pours in wine is being led by some of the country’s smarter restaurants – with virtually all the top Michelin restaurants offering just the 125ml pour (along with bottles and half bottles, of course). At the Noble Rot restaurants and bars, they will also pour 75ml taster pours, of which I’m a great fan. 

 

Although the brand restaurants currently focus on the larger 175ml and 250ml pours, maybe we will see them follow their smart cousins, because the upside of the smaller pours is the greater profit margin achievable. Six 125ml glasses can command a greater overall price than for a 750ml bottle.

 

A rather novel approach to wine measures is being taken by the Josephine restaurants in London, which serve the house wine “au metre”. Apparently, it is commonplace in France, but this is a first in the UK, according to the waiter during my recent dinner at the new Marylebone branch. A large-sized bottle was brought to our table, and at the end of the meal, the waiter placed a ruler against it to indicate the number of glasses we’d consumed.

 

No doubt this system is to tempt you into having a tad more than you intended, but personally, I found it can equally achieve the opposite. It gives the customer control of their consumption – provided you deter the waiter from invariably wanting to top-up the glasses at every opportunity.

 

The one flaw in the system though is that the ruler scale is calibrated by the glass, so there is the potential for disagreement if the waiter rounds it up a glass rather than down in the diners’ favour. At the end of our meal, they rounded it up on the bill until I requested that they rounded it down.

 

This shrinking-drinking phenomenon is also being played out in some of the more fashionable cocktail bars, including Manchester’s Blinker Bar, which has mini margaritas, snaquiris (mini daiquiris) and tiny negronis for £5, and OMA in Borough Market, which has mini negronis and clementine gimlets for £5.50. They are among a band of inventive bars increasingly playing around with miniature cocktails. These smaller creations lend themselves well to tasting menus of drinks. At The Bar With Shapes for a Name in east London, they have been offering three varieties of small-scale martinis, and other such experimental flights are planned. 

 

Since smaller pours win out on so many fronts – for both consumers and operators – I’m very much hoping we’ll see them become a widespread feature across the whole hospitality landscape. And with it, we’ll hopefully see a lot less of those horrendously over-sized 250ml pours. We’ll all be better for it.

“When did you become so cynical?” Next year will be my 20th involved in the hospitality sector, including 17 years reporting on its many ups and downs (the other three years of 2008-2011 was a perfectly timed move into working for a sector property advisory firm). Those unlucky few who have known me for most of that time have increasingly asked me that question as the years have rolled by. I like to think that as a journalist, a heavy dose of cynicism is a prerequisite of the role, but I have to admit for a few years at the start I was still taken in by impressive roll out plans, talk of global footprints and the latest reinvention of the wheel.

My feeling has always been that while writing about a sector, you have to be a champion for said sector; to see the positive and find the crumbs of comfort – something that has become increasingly challenging over the course of the past few years. Writing opinion pieces on how bad things are – and garnering a reaction from readers – has become like shooting fish in a barrel. The way the government is entrenched on its tax path, it is also like shouting into a vacuum. That’s why I was taken slightly aback this week when a leading competitive socialising operator got in touch to ask: “Why is no-one saying how bad it is in our sector at the moment?”

 

The conversation sprung from news of the latest piece of investment in the sector. Gresham House, the current backers of Rockfish and previous investors in Vinoteca and Pho, had invested £4m into Spinners, the three-strong concept, which offers games such as bowling, crazy golf, darts and shuffleboard. A Sky News piece dutifully rolled out the following lines: “Its expansion plans reflect the growth of experiential leisure activities, with technology-led innovation in crazy golf and shuffleboard fuelling consumer spending at a time when many traditional pub and nightclub operators are experiencing significant financial pressure. Other businesses that have raised capital to fund rapid growth include F1 Arcade, the Formula One simulator brand, and Red Engine, the group behind Electric Shuffle venues.”

 

Let’s take the first one of those lines. As the operator admitted to me, “the market has been soft for a while now, corporate spend has held up, but leisure, especially in the under 25s, has declined”. And that’s without taking into account the recent hot weather, with April’s sunny spell seemingly the best since that seen five years ago, when the whole sector was in lockdown. “What we would give for some light drizzle”, one competitive socialising operator opined.

 

And as for that second line, both Red Engine and F1 Arcade, plus the likes of Clays, Fairgame and Swingers, have secured funding with international expansion very much front of mind, aware that the UK market, especially in major cities, is close to being saturated. The category is already starting to see casualties, from VR-led concept Otherworld to Ballie Ballerson and axe-throwing business Whistle Punks. Even one of the originals – All Star Lanes – would surely have had to consider its future before it was recently neatly placed under control of The Light business.

Others are showing signs of creaking, with a number believed to be reaching out to those more-established operators to see if merger or consolidation opportunities are available. I understand that Sixes, the cricket-based competitive socialising brand, has recently quietly closed its sole site in the US, in Dallas, which opened in 2023, which follows the closure of its debut franchise site, in Leicester.  Of the more established operators, Professionals at Play – the Foresight-backed, parent company of the Roxy Lanes, Roxy Ball Room and King Pins concepts – told Propel at the start of the year that it planned to open at least six new venues across its brands in 2025 to deliver more than £50m of revenue and further Ebitda growth. It has since made its debut in London, in the City, with a further opening in Holborn to follow. The business was understood to be beauty parading advisors last autumn ahead of a possible process this year. 

However, when I asked about this in January, co-founder Matt Jones said: “We have not appointed advisors yet. Foresight is still debating what it wants to do and whether it is going to realise its minority investment in the company soon. Ben and I, as majority shareholders, have no intention to sell any shares and are happy to keep growing with minimal debt for now.” Lane7 has long been rumoured as another category candidate gearing up to review its options, and I understand it had carried out some preliminary work with advisory firm Clearwater. With companies now on each other’s doorsteps across the country, Lane7 is now set to debut ML7, a smaller format, in Newcastle later this summer, that it hopes will provide more expansion runway here. 

 

A deal that would test the temperature of the category still seems some way away, unless it is a restructuring one. So, is this the first bump in the road for a market that is still held up as one of the overall sector’s bright spots, especially as the pub sector looks to muscle on some of the market? Or teething problems usually associated with a maturing market? Either way, there is a sense that something may have to give first. Early next year, Poolhouse, the latest concept from the founders of Topgolf and World Golf Systems, will launch in London. Chief executive Andrew O’Brien said the capital had become the Silicon Valley of competitive socialising but that the main opportunity for growth lay elsewhere.

O’Brien said: “There are many great concepts in this competitive socialising space. We’re taking inspiration from some of the best, and we believe that the dominant upside can be found in the US through subsequent expansion. The quality of the beverages and the food is really important, to try and make people feel like this is a place that they should just visit regularly, not just once or twice a year. I think that’s an opportunity within this space. Guests will become more discerning, and they will seek out the best opportunities and the best experiences.” Gresham’s investment in Spinners feels like jumping on to the last carriage as the train leaves the station and finding the last seat. It will hope it is not doing so as the category enters its first tunnel.